Parrot Analytics Is Bringing Its Global Measurement Tools to African Cinema for the First Time

When Next Narrative Africa Fund (NNAF) and Los Angeles-based entertainment analytics firm Parrot Analytics announced a partnership in early February, their plan to release a landscape study on "African entertainment" caught my attention — as it did for other professionals tracking this space. Given how many reports have attempted to map similar terrain, I wondered what this one might actually capture that others have not.

I started pulling research together for an Akoroko Premium assessment, then other things took over, as they do. The MBC Egypt-Saudi Arabia story I dispatched yesterday — MBC Group is listed among Parrot's clients — brought me back to it, and with the NNAF/Parrot report due any day now, I thought I should go ahead and complete my piece. To be sure, this is not a challenge to what they're building. It's closer to what I'd call informed anticipation — trying to understand, based on what's publicly known about Parrot's methodology and track record, what a study like this can realistically tell us, and where its limits are likely to be.